Page 85 of Proof By Contradiction
The next day, Tuesday. Six-something PM.
The building empties, doors. Footsteps. Then nothing, last lectures done. Staff trickling out, fluorescent lights on their dim setting. The maths department on the fourth floor is empty; nobody comes up here voluntarily, not even the mathematicians.
Room 4.12. Corner room, one window, a lectern that’s seen better decades. Laurence is packing his bag. Papers, laptop, the Thermos he carries everywhere, the leather satchel, too old for a thirty-one-year-old, exactly right for him.
I stand in the doorway.
He sees me, stops mid-zip.
Pulse.
‘Not here.’ Quiet. Final.
He doesn’t move.
That’s the thing. The mouth saysnot here, but the body doesn’t step back, doesn’t reach for the bag, doesn’t walk to the door. The body stays.
Inside. Door shut behind me.
‘Ewan. Don’t.’
I sit on the lecturer’s desk. His desk. Where he stands, where he teaches, I lean back—the boy where the man should be.
‘Come here.’
He comes. Because of course he does. The mouth lost this argument three minutes ago.
Minutes pass. Seconds. The sound of a door opening somewhere on the floor. We’re standing three feet apart. I was by the window, arms crossed, face neutral. He stood by the lectern, coat in hand, bag across his back.
‘The epsilon-delta proof,’ I say, fast. Low. ‘Ask me about it.’
His eyes flash. Understanding.
‘So the bound on the error term is tighter than you’d expect,’ he says, just as the door opens. Mid-sentence.
The cleaner. A man in a blue tabard with a mop and a trolley and an expression of mild surprise.
‘Thought this room was empty.’
‘Just finishing some preparation,’ Laurence says. His voice is perfect. His hands are shaking. ‘We’re just heading out.’
The cleaner nods, wheels the trolley in. Doesn’t look at us again.
The corridor, the stairwell, the ground floor.
Laurence stops at the fire exit. Turns to me. His face is the colour I imagine drowning victims go before they’re pulled out.
‘That’s it.’ The words are granite. ‘I mean it, Ewan.’
I look at the satchel strap twisted where he’s gripping it. At the vein in his neck.
‘Okay,’ I say.
This time, I want to believe him.
Almost.
The pub near campus has sticky tables, a fruit machine that plays the same six notes on rotation, and a draught Guinness that Femi insists is acceptable and I insist is an insult to Ireland and my grandad’s memory.
